The last two nights of Bowling 2.0- T-Shirts and the Final Sweep by Socialtext. We had a great time videoblogging you all. Hopefully we’ll have a videoblog team on the league next time! Enjoy!
-Ryanne and Jay from RyanIsHungry.com

Monday’s night games were a great match up. We had Women 2.0 vs. 3bubbles&stirr dueling it out on lanes with bumpers (since they were in the last two slots

The first half of the night was a position round for all the teams. The second half of the night had the top two teams dueling it out in front of a crowd of 60 people cheering on one of two teams. We even had a news station there capturing all this on video.

It was quite the upset, just a few weeks ago, Socialtext was hanging around 4th place. In the past 3 weeks, they’ve pulled out all the stops to bring their standing into 2nd with the start of the finals. it was a social network vs. wiki challenge, who would win?

Well, the wiki seems to have kicked ass and taken names. Socialtext came from behind to beat facebook and steal the bowling 2.0 title.

Tonight is the freaking night. We finally got our bowling shirts in, the finals are kicking off, everything is looking good. Tonight, ALL teams will play 2 games. Next week, ALL teams will play 1 game at the start of the night, and then the top TWO teams will battle it out.

Here are current standings.So facebook is holding strong in #1, meetro and veeceebo are tied, and women 2.0 still isn’t making the charts…

The question “Why?” gets asked a lot. It’s a very good question, other then a shrug of the shoulders and a ‘why not’ response, bowling 2.0 grew out of a half joke between members of the meetro team. Being that meetro is social software that encourages people to meet in the real world, and we here at meetro are always looking for a good reason to throw a party, we were brainstorming some ideas of events to throw around silicon valley.

There are too many events that are heavy on the professional and networking side, but not many events where people just hang out, drink a few beers, and trash talk the competition. We started tossing around ideas of competitive sports, but quickly threw that idea out as we figured most geeks aren’t too physical! Then a joke came out… “Why not bowling?” After we all had a few good laughs, we said, wait a minute, bowling would be kinda cool… After all, it’s a sport, it’s competitive, beer pitchers are of the plenty, and it’s completely ironic to have all these high tech companies hanging out in such a low-fi atmosphere. Half the bowling machines look like they were produced before the Atari was invented!

So we thought about the idea a little more and decided we needed to make this happen. We reached out to a few companies and ppl really bit into it. We started talking to bowling alleys to see what was required to start a league. Heck, most of us here at meetro hadn’t bowled more then a dozen times in our life. For some, the last time they bowled was at a friends 6th grade birthday party.

We sent out a few emails and everybody was really excited on the idea. So we reached out to a few more companies, and they were excited about the idea as well. Then it was picked up on valleywag and interest exploded, we had to start turning companies away!

As part of a podcast segment on Tea Time, they asked me a few questions along the lines of “What’s happin’” in sunny palo alto, tune in to some details on how bowling 2.0 got started. Or just make fun of my stutter on the segment intro.

a9 takes the lead and veeceebo is trailing in 12th, you would think we ranked the teams alphabetically…..

So we had a mention in the Mecury News today where a number of teams were profiled. However, at the time of publishing, they seemed to have made an error with my name, calling me Vinnie “Tortelano” which is pretty far off from “Lauria” but at least it still falls into the same ethnic pool

Another name mistake takes the cake though, pbwiki’s name is displayed on the alley boards. The alley mistook their company name for pbwili.com! There’s no domain there yet, but I have a few thoughts on an interesting web2.0 site that could fill pbwili with more then just P&B.

I swung by the alley last Thursday to see if they had scores tallied up yet, but they were having some computer issues (it’s that old pre 1.0 technology.) I’ll be able to pick up last weeks scores tonight and post them here.

About

Bowling 2.0 is a fun idea to get web 2.0 companies around silicon valley into a real-world bowling league. It was started by folks who like to interact in the real-world, not just online. The leagues runs until Aug 28, 06.

The folks who brought you bowling 2.0 are now onto a new venture - lefora.com. Free forum for the masses!